Our Thoughts on ActiveCampaign

They’re one of the most affordable providers for small businesses and their software is exceptionally well-designed. Despite this, very few people have even heard of them.

We recently moved this website’s automation to ActiveCampaign and have since built a large number of workflows, pushing the software to its limits – here’s what we found.

There aren’t many bad things to say about ActiveCampaign. While the dashboard could be more customizable, and viewing a contact’s details could be made more intuitive, these are minor details. Unlike other marketing automation tools I’ve used that have been designed for small businesses, I’ve yet to have an idea that the software won’t allow me to build.

Their pricing is also extremely generous for the quality of product offered.

ActiveCampaign User Reviews

Active Campaign's Pros and Cons

Overall, ActiveCampaign is a very good piece of software with only a small number of flaws. It has one of the best user interfaces for building automation campaigns, making it easy and enjoyable to use.

Pros

Great user interface – The first thing that you notice when you start using ActiveCampaign is how well-designed and intuitive the user interface is. It’s one of the only marketing automation tools that I’ve come across that needs practically no training to understand.

Zapier Integration – ActiveCampaign integrates with over 150 different tools via their Zapier integration. While this enables you to connect ActiveCampaign with a huge variety of tools, you will need a paid Zapier subscription to access certain integrations.

Un-intimidating pricing – For the majority of small business who don’t want to commit to paying thousands of dollars per year to try marketing automation, ActiveCampaign is a great option. Their pricing starts at just $9/month with no upfront setup fees.

Helpful pointers – Quite often, when builder automation workflows late at night, I might forget to put in a time delay between two steps, or define an outcome for a conditional statement. ActiveCampaign helpfully notifies you about these to ensure your workflows run smoothly.

Cons

CRM & email builder design – While Active Campaign’s automation sequences are beautifully designed, their CRM and email builder is still lacking. Finding personal information on a lead in the CRM requires scrolling down a tiny window, while the email campaign builder feels like a relic of the 90’s.

No native integrations – Active Campaign doesn’t have any native integrations with third-party tools. While they do have a marketplace with over 300 apps and extensions, many of these require an additional ongoing cost.

Active Campaign Integrations

While Active Campaign do have several native integrations, the majority of their 150+ apps and integrations come through their Zapier integration.

While we found most of these integrations very comprehensive, some do require a PRO Zapier account. Below are some of the popular tools you can integrate with Active Campaign.

Active Campaign User Reviews

Write your review

Overall

Ease of Use

Customer Support

Anna

The biggest downside is the email editor - it's often buggy, but the logic for automation is great

I use several different platforms for email marketing and have also been a user of Ontraport, and InfusionSoft. I started looking up reviews on ActiveCampaign's CRM functions since it's been a year or so that I've been active in this platform. (I've automated my campaigns so much so that I haven't had to do much editing these days.) In any case, I wanted to see if any improvements have been done to the email editor, and it appears that it has not.

This is a huge disappointment since everything else is really well developed. What I like most about is the ease and creation of automations within campaigns. It's intuitive and follows the flow of the everyday logic. I am comparing this to MailChimp, which requires a lot of workarounds when creating automations. The upside to MailChimp is that its email editor is pristine.

I wish they would do something about ActiveCampaign's email editor, otherwise, it would get higher ratings from me.

I believe their Customer Support was okay. It had the appearance that they were available, but they weren't 100% as available as MailChimp's support chat. But overall, I believe my questions were always answered by ActiveCampaign support.

I am wondering though how much the CRM function is used by people who use this platform. I'd really love to know.

26th July 2016, 5:36 pm

Overall7

Ease of Use8.5

Customer Support7

4

19

Alternatives to Active Campaign

Ontraport is a great alternative to Active Campaign, and is particular popular among bloggers, coaches, and other businesses that are heavily focused around selling information products, or communicating with large mailing lists.

Infusionsoft is a popular alternative to Active Campaign, as their features and target audience are relatively similar. Infusionsoft is particularly good for small businesses with 2 – 100 staff members.

Hubspot are the most popular marketing automation tool for small businesses. While their product is excellent, you do need to be aware of price creep, as Hubspot’s pricing gets expensive as you require additional contacts.